WikiLit: A literature review of scholarly research on Wikipedia

This is the project website for WikiLit, a comprehensive literature review of scholarly research on Wikipedia.

Unlike permanent sites like AcaWiki (which compiles summaries of scholarly studies of all subjects) and WikiPapers (which compiles bibliographic and other details of scholarly research on wikis), this site is a temporary project site for a literature review of a narrow subset of studies: those that focus on Wikipedia. Our goal is to host our extracted literature review data here while we are in the final stages of the review, complete and clean it up, and then when completed, eventually export it all to long-term sites like AcaWiki and WikiPapers and anyone else that wants it.

Authors

Dataset

Pivot tables and charts

Feel free to play around with this pivot data; you can't break anything since whatever you change only affects your own viewing session. If you want to restart with the default settings, then just refresh the web browser page. We have a separate page with detailed instructions on manipulating this pivot data.

Key details about this literature review

We focused mainly on peer-reviewed journal articles (over 340) and PhD dissertations (over 30), and have systematically sought to include these. It is a huge project, and we had to draw a limit to what we would mainly focus on.

We have identified over 1,500 conference papers which we list with their abstracts. However, in our detailed analysis we have included only 100 or so of the most highly-cited conference papers. Because of our limited time and resources, unfortunately we were unable to analyze more than that in detail. However, we can certainly do detailed analysis of any important conference papers that we left out--please add them or point them out to us!

We do not include any items published July 2011 or afterwards, after which the Wikimedia Research Newsletter was formally inaugurated; we're letting them pick up from where we stop.

Request for help

Please help us verify the accuracy of our data extraction so far. Practically, if you could take a look at your own publications and the publications you know well, that would be great. It's an open wiki, so please make any corrections directly, even anonymously. (However, if you want us to acknowledge your contributions, please create a user account and identify yourself on your user page.) In particular, please help us with the following:

Please correct any inaccuracies you see, or e-mail us at wikilit - at - okoli.org to notify us of them.

Please point out any other scholarly studies (especially conference articles and significant non-peer-reviewed work) that you feel should definitely be analyzed in detail. Although we have listed 1,500 conference papers, our limited time and resources only permits us to analyze a fraction of them in detail. So, please help us highlight the most important ones that we have not analyzed in detail, with a brief explanation of why they are particularly important.

Please add scholarly studies published in languages other than English! Because of our resource restrictions, we could only search for and include studies in English. However, we very much welcome inclusion of the excellent work done in other languages. There is no need to translate the free-text article information, but please use the English data fields to enable comparability of the data.

Please suggest any data analysis or visualizations you would like to see as we synthesize and present the data.

Please give any other feedback or suggestions that can help us make this dataset more useful to researchers!

The data is publicly available (it is dual-licensed CC-BY-SA and ODbL, except for copyrighted abstracts), but this is a beta release and there are probably a lot of errors. We hope to have a stable and very clean dataset within a couple months, both from community help and from our own internal quality control processes; we'll make another announcement when we feel it has reached "featured" quality. In particular, please wait a bit before exporting the data to other research collection websites and wikis until it is in a cleaner state; by then, we'll help make it available in as many export formats as practical. No later than May 31, 2012, we hope that this dataset will have attained exportable quality. (If this notice has not been updated by that date, then please contact us at wikilit - at - okoli.org to ask for the current status.)

How can I edit the pages about existing articles and researchers?

Please help by filling missing fields in pages:

Navigate to any article or researcher

Click the Edit with form link at the top of the page

For articles,

Basic properties: Basic bibliometric data for the article

Identifiers: Links and bibliometric identifiers

Topics: Select all topics from the category tree that are relevant to the article. We need the most help here!

Domains: Select all domains of knowledge from the category tree that are relevant to the article. We need the most help here!

Research details: Relevant data related to the study that is pertinent to researchers. We need the most help here!

Additional info: Other information for the article, mainly related to related media

For researchers,

Add any missing information for yourself or others. Affiliation and country and the most desired fields!

However, before you officially publish anything where you cite the working paper, please check here and on SSRN to see if we have published the final version yet, so that you can cite that.

We have borrowed extensively from the forms, templates, semantic links, navigation structure and other presentation content from emijrp'sWikiPapers. Many of the fields of the templates in WikiLit follow the convention of WikiPapers.